Lone-tar version 3.2.3.1

This is a review of an OLDER version. New features are
available in the current Lone-tar release- check their web site
for details.

Lone-tar is one of the Supertar products. As is true for all
these products nowadays, there are versions for SCO Openserver,
Unixware, Linux, Solaris, HP and more. See www.cactus.com for
demos and more information.

Strangely, for a product who's primary market has been SCO for
many years, Lone-tar is not installed with custom. That probably
makes it easier to support the product across multiple platforms.
Unfortunately, like all good techs, I didn't bother to read the
installation instructions- I tried custom, and when that didn't
work, I looked at the disk and saw that it seemed to be in the old
Xenix "install" format- so I used "xinstall". Unfortunately, the
product will appear to install with that method, but doesn't
actually. This was all my fault, of course- the instructions were
in plain sight; I just ignored them.

You do have to register before installing. That can be done by
fax, phone or the web. I deliberately waited until 6:00 PM EST to
try registering by fax and over the web, just to see how long it
would be before I got the reply I needed. It was typical- noon time
the next day. There is a phone number you supposedly can call 24
hours a day if you need the registration immediately. You could
also download a demo version from http://www.cactus.com
and upgrade it to a licensed version later.

I liked that the install offered an option to print out the
Release notes and/or the entire manual. Another interesting feature
was a question that allows adding Xenix file system support to make
the Airbag rescue disks load faster. The install in general was
exceptionally easy- the only objection I had at all is that some of
the text was in red, and that made it hard to read on the failing
monitor I used for this test. It asked all the right questions,
suggested reasonable defaults for those who might not fully
understand their options, and proceeded quite quickly, including
making a set of "Airbag" emergency boot diskettes. That diskette
creation was surprisingly fast, and I liked the option to leave an
image of each disk on my hard drive, which of course makes creating
another set even faster. All in all, this was a very nice
installation- it could be made better by taking advantage of
available OS information about type of hard drive and tape drive,
but it's quite OK as is.

You start the program with
"ltmenu". As you can see, it's a simple, character based menu with
no frills. I've shown it here in its default SCO colors, but you
can can change the color scheme easily- the manuals are all on
line, and there's even a key-word search built in, so finding out
little details like this is very easy. However, I could not figure
out how to shut SCO console color off entirely- the documentation
implied that I could, but no matter what I did, I got color.
Truthfully, I didn't look very hard; I just changed the colors to
something I liked better. I did this by editing
/usr/lone-tar/.colorMENU and /usr/lone-tar/.colorQUIT. These
settings were much easier on my eyes:

However, I would have much preferred to just disable this
entirely- which you certainly could do with enough reworking of the
menu scripts, but that's more work than I'm willing to do just for
colors. Part of the problem is just setcolor itself- setcolor -n
does NOT change the -r options back to default, so it's very easy
to get confused while trying to set this to what you want (or don't
want)- which may very well be what was happening to me when I was
trying to shut it off. Even if you log off, your colors don't
change back to their boot up defaults, so it's very confusing.

I like a simple menu like this, because I know it's going to
work under almost any conditions, on almost any terminal emulation.
Also, because all the menus are just shell scripts, if I need to
modify them or just go directly to a particular function or
sub-menu, that's easy to do. Understandably, more complex
interfaces can't be done with simple shell scripts, but I'm always
glad to see that these are at least available as an option. No
doubt Lone-tar will one day succumb to pressure and build a
graphical interface; if they do, I hope they keep this as an
option.

Of course, you don't have to use any of these menus. The
lone-tar binary (/bin/lone-tar) can be run manually just like tar.
If you just type "lone-tar", you'll get a complete usage summary
(hint- if you want to redirect that to a file, the easiest way is
to use "script"- just run "script" and then type "lone-tar",
exiting script with CTRL-D when done).

All of the Supertars are based on the same
underlying binary, but they each add their own personality and
features, mostly in the surrounding menus. Therefore the
performance is going to be very similar if the same equipment,
block sizes, etc. are used. It's never been clear to me how much
modification the different vendors actually make to the binary. At
the present time, I have current versions of both Edge and Lone-tar
on this machine, and the binaries are significantly different in
size, but return almost identical usage instructions and complete
my disk backup with nearly identical times. There ARE slight
differences there, but more importantly the general usage and
philosophy of the surrounding environment is very different and
that's why you need to try them all if you are considering first
time purchase.

You control just about all of Lone-tar's actions through the
Environment menu. You can also just edit the /usr/lone-tar/ENV file
directly if you feel comfortable with that, but new users should
probably stick with the menu. I left everything at defaults and
started my first backup. While it ran, I looked back at this to see
what I might want to change.

For example, I might want to log all users off before a backup,
and keep them from logging back in during it. You can tell it to
abort an automatic or manual backup if the most current (last) tape
was left in the drive. You can add raw partitions to the backup
list and specify virtual (sparse) files.

Sparse files are a feature of Unix that is often
used for hashed index files where the file is very large, but most
of it has never actually been written to. By default, Unix
allocates no data blocks for any parts of the file that it doesn't
need to. When the file is read, the OS just provides null bytes for
those sections- therefore an ordinary tape backup would have to
write those null bytes to tape, and if the file were restored, it
would read them back, thereby accidentally and unnecessarily
increasing your disk usage. If Lone-tar knows that a file is
sparse, it will watch for that condition and neither write nor
restore the unnecessary null bytes.

You can also control your catalog files, turn printing of
results on or off, ask for notification of file names containing
spaces, set the pruning level for log files, and more. One item I
didn't immediately understand was the setting of a LAST_FILE name,
but actually this is an interesting feature. Whatever you set this
to is guaranteed to be the very last file that Lone-tar will put on
the tape- therefore, if you look quickly at the end of the
backup/verify logs and see this, you know that the backup or verify
was complete.

As I've pointed out in previous reviews of Supertar products,
don't assume that some feature of Lone-tar that I mention is or is
not present in the other Supertars. These guys are always aware of
what the competition is doing, and they all update their products
frequently, but that does not mean that the products are identical,
or even generally similar- they have very different styles and very
different ideas. Therefor, it's a very good idea to get demos of
all of them so that you can choose what is best for your individual
needs.

My first Lone-tar backup finished, but with some error. A TSS
(Tech Support sheet) was automatically generated and printed as a
result (this feature can be turned off if desired). This has
instructions to email or fax the report to Cactus and then follow
up with a telephone call. It's nice to see a company actually going
out of its way to solicit support calls, but I decided instead to
just try a different tape (I had noticed an error on this tape on a
previous backup with another Supertar product, so I was already
suspicious of it).

While that tape was running, I took a look at the on-line
documentation. It's very useful to have that accessible from the
menu, and the keyword search of Frequently Asked Questions is a
very nice touch. One of the ways Lone-tar tries to distinguish
itself from the other Supertars is by providing exceptional
support, and this attitude carries forward into the product itself
(as it should).

Documentation also includes access to the logs and catalogs of
backups and verifies you have made. Again, this is nice to have
immediately available from the menus. You have options to view the
logs, and since you can control the setting of PAGER in the ENV
section referred to above, you can use your favorite tool such as
"less" to enhance your viewing.

The Detailed Summary file gives options for examining or
printing the log file. The Short Summary looks at the last 2 lines
of the error log, and offers to automatically tack it onto the
/etc/motd file so that you'll see any errors from the previous
unattended backup when you log in.

The On-Line Documentation choice brings you to another menu
which breaks down the docs into their various sections and lets you
view or print each individually. I thought it was very helpful that
the menu shows you the number of pages before you decide to print.
The documentation includes a Tips and Useful Hints section that a
new user would find enlightening. The 25 page Error Reference
section is quite detailed and tries to explain what some of the
actual causes might be for any errors encountered.

By the way, every menu screen has a Help choice that fully
explains each menu choice whenever they aren't just selections that
open up to a more detailed menu. Here's the Help from the main
menu, showing you the shortcuts you can use the get where you want
to be more quickly.

Restores

My second backup finished without error, so it verified
automatically, and printed and emailed the results- either or both
of which can, of course, be shut off. By default (and I didn't
notice any place to turn it off) Lone-tar creates an index file
during the verify that can be used for Fast Seek Restore.

The ability to do fast seek is actually a function of your tape
hardware, but it is present on most modern drives. What this lets
Lone-tar and the other Supertars do is create an index that records
how many blocks into the tape each file is. The software can then
ask the tape drive to skip very quickly to that position. Then
normal reads are done, but the net result is that you can restore
any file in a very few seconds. For example, if I did a traditional
restore of a file from the backup I made for this review, it could
take up to 90 minutes to restore any given file. With the Fast Seek
Restore, it takes perhaps a minute or two at most, and that
includes answering all the necessary questions about what you want
and where you want to restore it to.

I did have trouble with this, though. Although I could use Fast
Seek Restore for some files, I could not use it for two test files
I selected that happened to be in /tmp. I don't know why; these
were about in the middle of the tape- I could restore files before
them and after, but not these. I tried it several times, but it
always failed. I could and did restore them with a traditional
restore, however, so there was nothing really wrong with the
tape.

I then tried asking to Fast Seek Restore a slightly earlier file
(I just checked the Catalog file to find one) and then told it to
do a normal seek (Lone-tar gives you that option) for the remaining
file. That worked, so it's a good trick to keep in mind should you
ever encounter this problem, and it's apt to be much faster than a
traditional restore even if you do miss it the first time as I
did.

Shortly after writing this, I received new
"fastseek" and "color" binaries from Jeff Hyman at Cactus. The
"color" now has the option of shutting color off entirely (though
this still is confusing for reasons explained above) and the other
seems to have entirely fixed the fast file restore problems. As I
have often said, it's not at all unusual for companies to have
minor glitches in new releases- what counts is how fast they fix
them, and Cactus came through with this in just a few
days.

Crony

Lone-tar of course has the ability to set automatic backups. In
addition to that, though, they include "crony", which lets you edit
crontab files through a menu driven interface. You can edit each
entry, changing the command or the schedule, and inactivate
particular lines (which just puts a "#" at the beginning of the
line so that cron won't see it) or delete lines entirely. For an
administrator not comfortable with traditional Unix editors, this
could be very helpful.

Airbag

As promised, the Airbag diskettes booted quickly. During their
original creation, I also had the option to add an Airbag startup
capability directly to the hard drive (it's just a new entry in
/etc/default/boot and an image of the A2 boot disk placed in
/stand). This lets you bring up the Airbag recovery menu in
seconds- an excellent idea.

The floppy boot disks can also be built to support BTLD's. This
would mean that you could change your controller hardware and still
manage to use the Airbag disk to boot from. Naturally, restoring an
entire tape in that situation wouldn't produce a workable system-
you'd need the BTLD again to boot it, and then you'd need to
actually install the BTLD, so it would have been easier to do this
ahead of time and create new Airbag diskettes, but this still could
be an important feature in some circumstances.

Another new feature is the ability to configure a modem for use
with the Airbag program, so that a remote technician (your dealer
or support people at Cactus) can dial up and take control of the
restore. This could also be a great feature for organizations with
remote sites without local support personnel. A mini-Kermit file
transfer capability is included so that you could even send a
needed or updated utility.

The Restore features include the ability to restore an
individual file system or just automatically recover the entire
system. Naturally, that could just be the root, which is often all
that is needed in many crash situations. Additionally, individual
directories can, of course, be excluded. The restore does a sanity
check on the hard drive after it reads the tape to be sure that
files necessary for boot are present; if they aren't, it copies
them directly from the floppy.

There are nice little "extras" in here, too, like the ability to
see the output that the boot produced so you can identify the
devices that were seen (this can save all sorts of confusion when
multiple tape drives are present, etc.). It's obvious that Lone-tar
pays attention to the small problems that come up during these
restores and tries to add features to make it easier.